1,480 developers from all over the world – yes, you heard that correctly – submitted their project. And guys, we don’t see 1,480 developers taking part to a contest for makers every day! Just to make a comparison, the AWS IoT Mega Contest by Amazon had only achieved 983 participants and Arduino, that is basically the microcontroller par excellence in DIY electronics, registered a little more than the three times the devs of ARTIK. A result beyond any expectation for a player which entered the space just a year ago.

What’s the reason for such a huge participation?

First of all, unlike the majority of projects on Hackster.io, the ARTIK Team thought it would have been funny to go for five distinct categories. You know, most challenges on Hackster are open to any topic, and makers are not only artists, but first of all problem solvers.

The 5 categories were:

Best Arduino & ARTIK Cloud mashup

Smart Home

Smart City

Wearables

Transportation

A brief digression: it’s worth noticing that these categories pretty much matched the areas makers like the most according to the 2016 Maker Survey, the treasure trove that Hackster recently released with probably the biggest amount of insights and information regarding makers that you can find for free online.

Requirement for the contest was, of course, to use the ARTIK Cloud APIs and SDKs to connect two or more devices and cloud service – Internet of Things anyone?

The Five Projects

The Best Arduino & ARTIK Cloud Mashup goes to Louis Moreau for his “Nerf-connected target on steroids”. The idea is to shoot a nerf arrow to a target with a toy gun and have the target recognize the hit and alert your colleagues on Slack. The project involves Arduino, Sigfox network, an Atim SigBee shield, ARTIK Cloud and, guess what, Slack. Watch this 10-sec video and tell me that you don’t want to build this for your workspace.

The victory in the Smart Home category belongs to Peter Ma with Face Lock Deadbolts, a cyber-physical system that exploits an Intel RealSense 3Dcamera to automatically unlock a deadbolt door when the user is detected in front of the door. The application and gets advantage of the facial recognition capabilities of the Intel’s marvelous camera to unlock deadbolt doors via ARTIK Cloud.

Amol Disale nailed the Smart City challenge with Eco – A Smart Garbage Container. How do you solve the waste disposal problem in your city? It’s easy: just link the waste management company of your city directly with your trash container, and it will know when you need your garbage to be emptied. If instead you want to dig the code deeper, here’s an introduction to the set up.

Hamed Shekari Chahestaninejhad is the winner of the Wearables category with “controlling patient’s fever with Artik & Arduino”. It’s a 2-device project: with the first one, a wearable device, the system monitors the temperature of the patient and, eventually, identifies the fever, with the second one instead it controls the temperature to adapt to the patient’s needs following the commands’ of the doctors.